She
had been joined in the No lobby by prominent figures of Labour’s left,
including Dennis Skinner, Diane Abbott, Ken Livingstone and a certain Jeremy
Corbyn.

In
the debate on the Maastricht Treaty earlier that year, Corbyn had said the
“imposition of a bankers’ Europe on the people of this continent will endanger
the cause of socialism in the United Kingdom.”

Like
Corbyn, she voted against Britain’s membership of the European Economic
Community in 1975.

And
her suspicions about the EU were solidified during her time as a Home Office
minister when she represented Britain frequently at Brussels summits.

“That
was when I really discovered the undemocratic nature and the whole cliquey-ness
of the EU — it’s all about ‘you scratch my back here and I’ll scratch your back
there’.”

Hoey
has since swapped roles with Corbyn. She plays the backbench rebel while he
bears responsibility for the party’s collective position to remain in the EU.

In
a speech to Labour councillors earlier this month Corbyn said he will use the
referendum to press for a “real social Europe.”

Equally,
she reports that Corbyn told her recently that he had no problem with her
involvement in the Leave campaign.

“The
reality is that we are doing a service to the party,” she contends.

“What
I believe we’re doing, in our small way, is flying a Labour flag in places that
there wouldn’t otherwise be a Labour flag flying, which doesn’t do any harm.”

Hoey
is one of half a dozen Labour MPs who launched the Labour Leave campaign last
month with funding from JML entrepreneur John Mills.

They
have been swamped with speaking invitations and Hoey has most recently visited
Kettering, Manchester and Exeter.

Early
experiences on the campaign trail have been encouraging for the Leave campaign
but disheartening for Labour, she reports.

“The
Labour Party is so out of touch with its supporters and ex-supporters,” she
says.

“The
thing that has struck me most, particularly in the north of England, is people
coming up to me and saying: ‘I used to be a member but we’re now Ukip voters
and it’s great that there’s people in the Labour Party saying what we think
about the EU’.”

Hoey
believes Labour’s enthusiasm for the EU is going to mean the referendum is
remembered as a “missed opportunity” to re-engage with the party’s traditional
working-class base.

“It
still astonishes me that there’s such a silence within the official hierarchy
of the Labour Party about the detrimental side of the EU.”

Margaret
Beckett’s autopsy of Labour’s general election defeat contests that theory,
however, concluding that “Ukip was in net terms more damaging to the Tories
than to Labour.”

And
critics of Labour’s most prominent Eurosceptic might suggest that the number of
“kippers” she’s bumping into might reflect badly on her campaign bedfellows.

The
Grassroots Out campaign with which she is now working is led by hard-right Tory
MP Peter Bone.

I
ask if she finds it difficult to campaign alongside people she has such
ideological differences with?

“The
reality is that if you really want to get out, every group has a slightly
different perspective, and we can only win this referendum if we can all come
together,” she says.

“I
don’t think there’s a problem with that.”

Turning
the question on its head, she adds: “The future aspiring leadership, people
like Chuka Umunna, are going to be campaigning on the same platform as a Tory
Prime Minister who has actually tried to destroy trade union rights through the
Trade Union Bill.”

She
brands the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign “very Establishment” and says:
“I doubt if [chairman] Lord Rose could go and talk to a bunch of car workers
and convince them that they should be voting to stay.”

However,
Hoey levels the same criticism at the the Vote Leave campaign, from which
Labour Leave disaffiliated last week after being sidelined by chief executive
Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Michael Gove.

“We
felt very much that we were not there for any other reason than to get them the
designation [as the official Leave campaign],” she says.

Her
conviction is that the referendum represents “the people against the
Establishment.”

The
question facing voters is who represents “the people” and who represents “the
Establishment?”

Hoey
answers with a direct appeal to trade unionists, Labour members and Morning
Star readers to “go with their instincts.”

Making
her pitch, she says: “A social Europe may have been the intention of some
well-minded, good-willed people.

“But
look at what’s happened in Greece and other countries that have had economic
austerity thrust upon them.

“That
is never going to be changed, influenced or reformed while you have a totally
unelected Commission and no structure that allows for genuine meaningful change
and no proper vetos for individual countries.”

On
that flourish, Hoey finishes her soup and practically sprints off towards the
Commons.

There’s
a debate on the timing of the EU referendum taking place, but she’s got a date
with the Fire Brigades Union parliamentary group.

British steel workers
marching in Brussels with their comrades from other European Union member
states are right to feel let down both by the EU and the Westminster
government.

Both
organisations are wedded to a neoliberal economic approach that promotes
maximisation of private profits through free trade and holding down workers’
pay and social benefits.

The
EU is pressing ahead with negotiations to finalise the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP) with the US, which will deny nation states the ability to
defend their economies against unfair competition.

It
will entrench the right of transnational corporations to sue national
governments for perceived financial losses because of “restrictive” laws passed
by supposedly sovereign parliaments.

TTIP
poses an impending grievous blow to national and local democracy and yet
Brussels refuses even to let citizens/subjects see the documents being
negotiated in their name.

Abandonment
of the steel industry in various EU member states is not an oversight or
misjudgement.

The
EU can take steps to defend European steel industries against what is seen as
unfair trade practices, including dumping.

It
chooses not to do so because it has no intention of alienating China with which
it hopes to conclude further free-trade agreements.

Britain’s
Tory government could have defended steel plant, communities and jobs in a
similar way to the bailout job carried out by New Labour, with Tory backing,
for the private banking sector that bankrupted itself through reckless, though
lucrative, speculative excesses eight years ago.

But
it has no interest in the manufacturing sector, including steel production,
which continues to decline despite all of George Osborne’s claptrap about a
northern powerhouse.

What responsible EU government would have let a £490 million contract for new
rolling stock for Arriva Rail North drop into the lap of a Spanish company last
month when Bombardier’s Derby train-building operation and Britain’s entire
steel industry are on their knees?

Steel
has been allowed to go the same way as Britain’s coal, shipbuilding,
automotive, motorcycle, aircraft, aerospace, computer and electronics
industries, starved of investment, privatised and broken up.

Neither
Tata workers marching in Brussels nor their families back in Britain should be
deceived into believing that the presence on the march of Tata European
operations chief executive Karl Koehler means that they’re all on the same
side.

Koehler
and his managers are interested chiefly in Tata profits, which is why, no
matter how regretfully, it announced over 1,000 job losses last month.

Pointing
the finger at Chinese imports as the cause of British steel industry woes is
disingenuous and misleading.

EU
steel imports into Britain are seven times higher than those from China, but
Beijing is a handy whipping boy for many reasons.

British
steel would be in a much healthier position if our governments had stood up for
it as strongly as the Chinese government has backed its own.

But
neither the Tory government nor the EU will take any meaningful steps to tackle
the problems of the industry, which requires substantial investment to
modernise and upgrade technologies.

Indeed
the EU stands in the way of any attempt by any government to impose emergency
duties or quotas on steel imports from inside or outside the EU or to provide
emergency funding to the industry.

Jeremy
Corbyn has indicated that a government under his leadership would be prepared
to defy EU diktats on these issues, pointing out that Germany and Italy have
already taken parts of their steel industries into temporary public ownership.

That
would be a start, but rebirth of Britain’s manufacturing base will be
impossible inside the EU, with its rules on free competition, on a long-term
basis.